Filtering By

To form something from nearly nothing, to obtain meaning by shaping, is what this picture promises.
Thomas Demand, referring to a photograph of Henri Matisse in his studio, “Thomas Demand on Matisse,” Tate Etc. 31 (Summer 2014)

What persists is an understated elegance and a sensitivity to gesture, color, and composition in fragmentary pictures: a silhouetted figure, a masked face, a veined arm. Presented in an oval format . . . the images might have been spied through a keyhole, and their Old Master allusiveness isn’t contradicted by the suggestion of dust and sweat.
New Yorker, review of Arne Svenson: The Workers at Julie Saul Gallery, 2015

It is about the poetics of not knowing—about both mining and understanding the membrane between the known and the unknown. Glenn Kaino, in “Building Bridges: Glenn Kaino,” by Seth Hawkins, Artillery (May 2015).

December 8
“As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it, and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures telling our brief story, but what will last, beyond all of it, is the place.” — Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs